News

calling an entity independent always means to keep the little power you own to yourself. It will never pay out for you in the end to surrender to yourself, a partner, a family, or, in the case of Facebook, to a dubious mega corporation which doesn’t give a shit about privacy and security, turning human beings into products and earns shitload of money in selling your personal data via advertising. That’s also why AETHYX MEDIAE never held a Facebook or Twitter account.

However, two billion and 130 million people (March 2018) on this planet already surrendered. Which represents 30% of humanity, ignoring age and nationality as well. These 30% literally are owned by Facebook. They gave away their interests, their social circles, their privacy and much more, to be exploited on a daily basis and provided a simple stupid feed, a neverending stream, with stuff they shouldn’t bother. This is the bad state in which we are now in 2018: social network addicts anywhere on this planet, earning nothing for providing personal data and being tricked year by year in spending more and more of their precious time inside a closed centralised web application which is designed in a way to be enhanced by the behaviour of its users only to be more addictive in the near future (keyword A/B testing).

By clicking on this image you will reach the overview with working links to these systems directly.

What we need urgently right now are more decentralised applications run by smaller companies and individuals. Most of these systems provide features you never heard of which are incredibly useful in enhancing, not castrating, your digital life. Interconnections between systems is also possible, something Facebook completely forbids and tries to control with their half-hearted APIs. Furthermore, these social network alternatives are so sophisticated these days, you’ll be surprised about all the eye-candy and stability. There simply are no reasons anymore to join Facebook today. You see: where is the problem in switching?

In case you need help in setting up one of these social hubs just drop us a line: info@aethyx.eu. We won’t charge a cent if you’re aged 16 or below.

What you need to understand here: you can’t change the world but yourself. Time to start already.

As you may have noticed, we used Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing in this case. This was a logical step as we were there already with our Ebooks. For the future, maybe this year, we want to give CreateSpace a chance too.

One thing about the price and for more transparency: producing a weblog in book form is incredibly pricey yet. Let’s take The Cipha.net Chronicles III as an example.

The price tag of 99$ may seem heavy but Amazon takes 33$ for the printing cost alone. Distributing it to seven markets costs us another 39,44$. If we sell one copy here, we earn ca. 27 bucks. Which may sound like a joke with this price tag but that’s the harsh reality.

We will see what lies ahead of us in this field and we can’t promise to do more paperpacks but look forward to it.

The bugs were known to Intel at least since summer 2017 thanks to the Google Project Zero Project. Another team from Austria, Graz, discovered the same bugs in November/December 2017. Between Intel and Google there was an agreement to keep the vulnerabilities secret. This secret was broken and made public by the British website “The Register” on the 2nd of January 2018. Most of the confirmations came from the programmers working on the Linux kernel, their communication is public. They had to work over the holidays and couldn’t enjoy Christmas and New Years Eve. Thus, the Linux kernel is not vulnerable to Meltdown anymore since kernel version 4.14.x since the first week of January 2018.

Concerning Spectre, both variants; currently it could be these fixes won’t work. There is a proposal from the Google team called RETPOLINE, but so far these didn’t make it into the Linux kernel nor into Windows updates or MacOS updates. The other proposal from Intel side was “straight bullshit” according to Linus Torvalds. From what is known today, Spectre will be an IT security problem for at least months to come. Due to the fact this is a hardware bug, it’s almost impossible to fix this from a software side. For real, the only workaround with which you’re safe right now is: change your CPU. Cheers!

Why should you bother?

The problem isn’t really the local machine you’re working with: Meltdown and especially Spectre are incredibly hard to exploit even for skilled hackers. The problem is what kind of data is residing on a server. Whether it be your Emails, your visited websites, your bank account details, your photos of your loved ones, your social media profiles; with the accurate technique all of this data can be stolen without a trace 100% from Intel machines. And according to recent statistics these CPUs run ~70% of the Internet today. All operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, etc.) are affected anyway. As mentioned before, this is a hardware bug. Usually, hardware bugs are in no way fixable with software patches.

To make things worse and to give you an example of bad morale and integrity, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold 250,000 shares of his Intel stocks at the end of 2017. He knew what would lie ahead for him and his rotten company but didn’t think a bit about his customers. This is truly the f***ed up world in which we’re living right now. We hope you can deal with these facts and keep on.

We’re active in the IT sector since 2000 but never experienced anything similar severe to these bad news. Of course we knew that Intel is ahead of the pack regarding bad design and bad behaviour regarding computer processors. What we didn’t know was that Intel didn’t change at all. Since the marketing campaign for the i3/5/7 processors anyone thought they learned from their mistakes. Apparently they didn’t. Which makes Intel probably the most dangerous company in the whole wide world.

Never forget to update your computer in 2018. Good luck to y’all!

Sincerely,
the aethyx staff

“Over-specialisation means that there are more persistent vulnerabilities too. A deadly threat.” – “Ghost in the Shell”, Japan, 1995

* good reputation
* offer their services for a pretty long time already
* are not available through the clearnet
* 25 MB are free
* it’s easy to set up

Who knows, maybe we’ll widen the experiment some day in the future. Right now we’re taking part, observing. Today, it’s just an experiment.

We share the opinion that the dark web (or darknet, as it’s synonymously used) is still in it’s early stages of development. But as we stated above and elsewhere on our sites, things won’t get easier from last year on. Democracy is under attack and also its citizens. And for millions, who knows how many, the dark web became their one and only spot to communicate, to trade, and source of information. We are an independent online publisher, we support that. And want to be part of it. And no, we don’t think you’re paranoid: you are just normal.